Carousel Projector

Posted on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 in Photography

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How can you convert pictures on slides (old projector type) into digital images?

I have 5 boxes of old carousel slide projector type slides that need to be converted to a digital format. Are there companies/sites/businesses that do it, or can I get some kind of funky computer peripheral to do it myself. Is it expensive?

Get it done by a commercial service. You will spend the rest of your life on this project if you try to do it yourself.

Here's a place that says they will do it for 35¢ a slide scanned to 2,000 dpi, which is decent. The price goes up to 45¢ for 3,000 dpi and 65¢ for 4,000 dpi. They have a $100 minumum order, though, so if you have "only" 150 slides, you may as well go for the highest resolution. When you get your images back, the higher the resolution, the easier they are going to be to work on.

http://www.myspecialphotos.com/scanning.asp

There was an article in PopPhoto about someone who outsourced to India for an even lower price. The service is called ScanCafe. You can read their impression here: http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/4844/the-24-cent-scan.html
or go to the website directly: http://www.scancafe.com/

They also have some guidelines for do-it-yourself scanning if you are glutton for punishment: http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/4286/get-your-old-slides-and-negatives-onto-a-scanner.html

If you have time to kill and plenty of it, you might get a slide scanner. Here's my stock answer on that:

If you don't want to lose the resolution and details, you are going to have to bite the bullet and get a good film scanner. The Nikon Coolscan V ED will go up to 4,000 dpi resolution. There is a slight learning curve, but it's a great piece of equipment. Minolta makes one that is probably comparable in the same price range, which is about $550. There is another company that I am not familiar with called Pacific Image that makes several slighly lower resolution film scanners for about half the price.

There are other Nikon products as well as some by other manufacturers. I chose the Coolscan V ED because a review in Popular Photography said that the dynamic range of the V ED was greater than perceived by the human eye and that's good enough for my purposes.

Here's one example of a slide I scanned. Flickr will allow up to a 20x30 poster print from this high resolution image.

Here's a link to more scanned slides: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/tags/slide/

Here's a link to a lower priced scanner that would also be suitable:

http://www.popphoto.com/digitalscanners/2491/which-scanner-should-i-buy.html

While going to a photo store is certainly the most cost effective for a few slides, if you have a lot to do, you might consider using a commercial service (do an internet search and you'll find one near you) or just buying your own slide scanner. I have a Nikon Coolscan V and it's a great piece of equipment. The only downsides are the intial cost of $600 (It has not dropped in price in 3 years.), which make the drug store approach rather attractive for a small stack of slides, and the time cost. Once you start doing this, you will want to make every scan perfect before you finish with it. Fingerprints and dust that you can overlook on a projected image look horrible in a print.

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